


And twice more our paths crossed through the night

by thewindupbird



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, Mutual Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 12:11:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4521438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewindupbird/pseuds/thewindupbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place immediately after the end of the novel, in Boris's flat in Antwerp. Theo muses on the things they did as teenagers, and the tension between them finally reaches its breaking point. Almost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And twice more our paths crossed through the night

_We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us._

Some time after Boris slid the needle from his arm, after the chattiness and the longwinded storytelling had died down he went quiet, and I could feel his black eyes on me in the dark -- flickering away, and then back again. The couch tipped beneath my right hip as Boris shifted and then suddenly his head was on my shoulder, long-fingered hands -- glints of silver from his rings flashing in the flickering television light -- pushing long black strands of hair from his eyes. I could feel myself go tense at the gesture, strange and vulnerable in its familiarity, its intimacy, and I shifted my shoulder _What are you doing?_ but Boris wrapped his fingers around my forearm, just above my wrist, all the way around and vice-like and muttered, annoyed, “Don’t be so ridiculous, am tired. If you like, you can sit on the floor, and I will sleep here, but now, you don’t give me enough room so. What can I do?”

I sighed through my nose, smell of cigarettes and boozy sweat from Boris, and a hint of copper from my nosebleed, earlier, after a bump. Despite his wiry build, he was heavy, but we sat like that until the end credits rolled, until I realised both that my arm was asleep, and that he was dozing, breath easy and even, lulling me into drowsiness myself. I watched the words on the screen, and I saw their imprint -- electric sliding lines -- on my irises when the screen finally went black. I don’t know how long I sat there with him leaning against me, fingers still curled around my arm, but loose now, half open.

We'd woken up more than once, in Vegas, huddled in each others arms like small children or lovers (were we? I don’t think so-- the things we did as boys, in the desert, our hands between one another's legs, our ragged breathing and Boris’s blown out pupils huge and disorienting before he hit the cusp and his fingers would slow, and I would have to finish myself -- that wasn’t something lovers did. At least not in the frantic, wrecked state in which we had done it.) Still, I always felt a sense of calm, then. The possibility of maybe, someday, being all right; waking up in the morning with my head tucked down against his, his arms around my back and one knee up between us, pressing sharply into me, the earbuds still trailing from his ear to mine, but the music long gone silent and the soft sound of Popchyk snoring on his back between us, his mouth half-open, revealing black inner-lip, slightly twitching paws.

But that was all we ever did, aside from the time he’d taken my face in his long-fingered hands, strangely cold in the desert heat, and kissed me -- when I thought I would never see him again. Sometimes I still couldn’t quite believe it, so disoriented, still, when he ducked into the shop from the rain or threw his arms around me in the hotel in Amsterdam. He always appeared when I least expected him. And when I needed him the most, although I constantly told myself otherwise.

Sometimes I wondered if it would have been less strange, less surreal if we had kissed on all those wasted nights in Vegas. If it would have made the whole thing more, or less intimate -- because as it was; the wet slick sounds of my fingers sliding over him in the darkness had made me ache, as did the way he would hold my eyes until I felt like I was burning under his gaze. Before he finally screwed his eyes shut and twitched back, shuddered, fingers twisting viciously in whatever he could find, the bedsheets, my shirt, rucked up almost to my armpits, my hair, damp with sweat. I always felt relieved when he shut his eyes, because I never knew what he was looking for there, in mine, or what he wanted from me. Always, something went unsaid, the way you wait for someone to speak when they draw in a breath, or swallow -- words hanging in the air, forever unspoken, between us. If I had kissed him then, maybe the tension of things unsaid would have been swallowed up.

Perhaps.

I woke with a jolt and a gasp, nauseous and dizzy, pins in my fingers. To my right, Boris chuckled and said, “Calm down, Potter.” I could hear his limbs popping as he stretched. It was very dark for a moment, before he felt around on the coffee table, rings knocking against bottles and ashtrays before he found the remote and mashed a few buttons. The weather came on alarmingly loud, and I think we both jumped, before he muted it, lighting the room in a soft flickering glow. He met my eyes in the half-dark as I twisted my arm, trying to get the blood flowing again. His hair was mussed on one side where he’d been asleep on my shoulder.

“Bed, I think,” he said and held out a hand.

I looked at it for a beat. “What?”

“Tired,” he said. He'd drawn back, lighting a cigarette, waving it at me, ash falling to the carpet. “Coming?”

“Well--”

“Come on,” he said, “Don’t be so-- I don’t know. The couch isn’t good for sleeping.”

“Boris, I don’t--” but he’d caught my arm, the one I’d been trying to get some feeling in again and I hissed at the zinging shock of it, as he pulled me to my feet. If he’d looked at me right then, I think I would have sat down again, insisted on sleeping there on the sagging couch. If he’d just said something, so I could speak over him, things might have been different -- but he didn’t. Instead, he was quiet, face turned away, and I followed him to the darkened bedroom down the hall, the faint glow of the television behind us only just lighting our way. He dragged his shirt over his head, and pointed towards the bed: a low, boxy thing, practically a mattress on the floor, no headboard, the top corner of which was just slightly illuminated in the faint orange glow of city lights muted behind the curtains. “Go, before I shut the door,” he said. “Careful of the rubbish bin--” he said too late, a split second after I’d tripped over it and sent it clanging, pushing my heart up to flutter in my throat. Catching my breath I dropped onto the mattress because there was nothing else to do, and if I decided to leave now, it would be even more strange than this thing we were about to do -- sleep in the same bed like it was natural, like grown men did this all the time.

He pushed the door shut with a strangely elegant gesture, and I could see his tall, gangling figure for just a second or two before the latch clicked into place, throwing the room into blackness. For a moment, I could only hear him in the dark, catch sight of the glowing end of his cigarette, first here, then there -- eerie in the unfamiliar space, rustling of fabric and then he was there, colliding with me accidentally, hands coming up to break the impact, clipping my jaw before settling on my shoulder, a knee against my thigh. We both drew in a sharp breath, -- _Jesus_ , Potter -- and then he was laughing, shifting past me to collapse on the mattress nearest the wall.

My eyes were adjusting slowly, and there was nothing to do but lie back, pushing my arm beneath the thin pillow to support my head, listen to Boris finish sucking on his cigarette before he reached over me, over my chest, to put it out somewhere near my head, tapping of the filter against an ashtray, or just the top of the bedside table.

“You sleep with your glasses on, now?” He asked. “In case you have to make quick getaway, eh? Here. Give them to me.” I did, our hands bumping, and he set them down somewhere, soft click of their frames on a hard surface. He drew away from me then, lying back on his side of the bed and I shut my eyes, listening to my breathing. I still can’t place why I felt so strange, so on edge. Perhaps I was thinking about this worrying new habit of Boris’s: Shooting up in his dark little flat in Antwerp, alone. The fact that he didn’t want to stop...

And neither did I, but I didn't use needles, and my doses were always controlled. I felt like I had a better grasp on it than Boris did; Boris who wasn’t afraid of anything at all.

 _So, why not stop then?_  
_Why should I?_  
_Do I really have to say why?_

Maybe I should have said something more. Maybe I should say something now, but what? _Stop because you’ll fuck yourself up. Stop because it’s dangerous. Stop because I-- because..._

“What is it?” he whispered to me, startling me out of my thoughts so suddenly I felt a rush of vertigo and shook my head hard, to clear it. He reached out and steadied me, long fingers against my jugular. I felt a thrill of tension and then he was leaning over me again, elbow against the mattress, fingers against my throat. “Your heartbeats--”

Like his word triggered it, the tachycardia kicked in, fluttering and racing against my ribs. I took a breath and made to sit up but he pushed me back. “Did you take something while I was sleeping?

“No. This happens.”

A sigh. I could almost see him narrowing his eyes. “Hey,” he said, palm rubbing a circle on my chest, my heart beating like it might break from me and pulse right into his hand, but then he was touching my forehead with his knuckles, brushing the hair away. “Potter...”

I don’t know why I kissed him, then. Maybe because I just needed to do something, think of something here, present, before I spun off into that circle of fear and despair. My teeth clashed against his and he made a sound low in his throat, surprised. I felt his fingers between our mouths as I recalculated the distance and I caught his wrist and wrenched his arm down and kissed him again, viciously, pushing him back so I wasn’t flat on my own.

Maybe it was a way of completing that kiss in the desert, years ago. Maybe if I completed it, I could shut the lid on that particular moment in my memory, eliminate unfinished business. Maybe then I could stop walking around like a ghost -- or a little less like one, anyway. I should know, by now, that there are no do-overs. You cannot go back to a fix a single moment, and had I kissed him back then, maybe the whole course of our lives would have changed. Maybe we would both be dead now, or only one of us, or maybe we would have ended up together, homeless and starving on the streets of New York, sucking cock for change.

His mouth tasted like cigarettes, and his tongue was dry, scraping the inside of my mouth, and I think it was only then that I realised in any real sense, that he was kissing me back.

We clung to each other, hands tangled and pulling at each other's hair, our arms getting in each other's way and I had to struggle with him to pull away, to sit up so I could undo his jeans, but he was clutching the back of my skull, saying anxiously against my mouth, “No! no,” which meant _don’t leave_. When he realised where my hands had gone, however, tugging at the heavy cloth of his jeans he let me go and arched up, nails scraping against the bedsheets.

I don’t know what I expected. Piercings, perhaps, shock of hard metal against the curve of my hand, but he was like I remembered in those hazy dream-like memories, just him -- hot, thin skin against my hand and suddenly I felt almost like crying and it shocked me so much that I must have gone still, because suddenly he was there, kissing me again like he didn’t want to revert back to what we had done as boys where we never kissed, where we woke up on opposite ends of the bed and never spoke of it in the morning.

I made a sound when he pressed his hand up between my legs and he swallowed it, and there was a strange, unreal duality to the whole thing -- then and now -- because it was so easy to slip back into all of this again, despite being fairly sober, despite him being taller than I remembered, the new tattoos, the absence of those leather bracelets and -- “ _Ah!_ ” _fuck --_ the slight pull of his rings against the skin of my cock.

 _Shh hush_ , he pushed me onto my back by the hip, climbing over me, switching hands -- more skin and less metal now. It struck me then how much the room replicated my own in Las Vegas, the bed in the corner, the window slightly to the right of our heads. And somehow we still fit, hips hitched close together, hands working, only this time when he came, his hands didn’t go still, instead he hovered low over me, breath hot and heavy against my collarbone, fingers still working. His mouth dragged against my throat, the underside of my jaw, not kissing, just open, warm breath, and he mouthed something which -- I've never asked -- might have been my name. Not Potter, _Theo_.

Like I said, I could be mistaken.

When I came, my temples pounded with the force of it, and for a second I didn’t know anything at all, but then, little by little... our breath coming unevenly, chests rising and falling out of rhythm with each other, things came back into focus. Finally he rolled away with a groan, and went oddly silent.

I said his name, softly, after a moment or two.

“Hm?” he said, a little abrupt, a little too loud.

I blinked rapidly at the ceiling -- would I? -- yes. I rolled into him and kissed him, again. It lingered too long afterwards, mouths not quite touching, both of us waiting, perhaps, for the other to make contact again, but neither of us did. I pulled away, used a corner of the sheets to wipe my stomach and then just let myself drift, thinking vaguely that I should probably leave.

“Potter,” he whispered. It might have been hours later.

“What?”

“Be here in the morning, yes?”

I sighed, pressed a hand over my eyes, as though to block out the light, and then said softly: “yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song 'Boats and Trains' by Stornoway.


End file.
